The Musician and The Ghost - DISCONTINUED
by Random Riter11
Summary: It's cold outside when the Phantom finds a kindred spirit.
1. Chapter 1

Disgusting. It's the only description for the menagerie of people assembled around his opera house. It is a shame that even though his power over the interior of the Opera Populaire is absolute, the streets outside of it are completely beyond his influence.

If he was in charge of the surrounding city, a circus would never have been allowed to stop in it.

He hates circuses, with a passion. He hates them more than tuneless singers and graceless ballerina. He hates them more than a cast who can not act and a manager who refuses to listen to him.

He can fix a bad opera. But he refuses to go near a circus with a ten foot pole.

Or, at least, he would normally.

Erik pulls his cape a little closer to ward off a phantom chill as he ghosts through the camp. The cape, while normally being an ally in his nightly escapades, is more of a detriment in this case. Its stark outline stands out harshly against the multitude of colored tents that make up the camp and he worries a little more than he normally would about being spotted.

But that is probably nerves talking.

He hates circuses.

Bad memories. His confidence is at an all time low.

It's a little ironic, the Master of the Night, the deadly and dangerous, Phantom of the Opera, shaking in his boots over a few colored tents and caravans.

And a whip and a gypsy who loved to use it and his face, his accursed, abhorrent, damned-

Erik shakes his head and increases his speed, he could stand there and brood the night away if he let himself start thinking about _that_. Besides he is not that same little boy, he is dangerous and talented and _armed_. Even if someone does see him, they will not be survive long enough for it to affect him.

The phantom continues his trek through the circus but darts into a dark corner when a sharp cry pierces the air. A second cry keeps him silent and alert in his spot of darkness. A few more pass and he realizes they are an adequate distance away for him to continue without worry. He walks out and prepares to continue on his way but another scream brings a sudden realization to him.

The voice is a child's.

...

But why should he care?

Erik walks a few more feet when another agonized cry stops him in his tracks. It is raw and pained and full of something he himself had been familiar with in another part of his life.

Acceptance.

It is not the cry of someone trying to fight back, it is the cry of someone who knows trying to stop the pain is useless.

And without thinking, the Phantom pivots on his feet and sprints towards the sound.

It's not rational, he has a purpose for being out and he should fulfill it as quickly as possible so that he can return to his home and ignore the circus parked outside his door.

But he's always been a creature of passion and his mind is filled with memories and a deep rooted, even if long forgotten, desire - _Help Me! Please!_

Another scream fills the air and he reaches it in record time.

The scene that greets him is horrifying but not surprising.

A boy, no older than ten but probably much younger, cowers as a man in a flamboyant suit and large top hat looms over him, holding a blood stained cane high in the air. The man is grotesquely overweight and the boy is shockingly thin. The man is red in the face and screaming, the boy is pale and shaking.

And Erik is enraged. He sees red and then a corpse as the man falls down onto the dirt.

Erik's lasso is out of sight seconds after.

And he is calm.

The boy is too. He gazes at the cane that had fallen next to the man, to the corpse of the man himself, and then up to Erik.

"Boy," Erik says gruffly. "Are you-"

The boy's eyes close and his body begins to fall. Erik catches him before the boy sullies himself by falling next to the man who had abused him and makes a quick assessment of his injuries.

Several bruises line up on his back and torso in neat rows, undoubtedly caused by the cane. A few times the cane had landed hard enough to break skin but none of the wounds are deep enough to be life threatening. Erik runs the hand not holding the boy, up and down the child's body (a task made easy by the fact that the boy is only wearing a pair of dark pants, a piece of blue fabric wrapped around his left arm and shoulder, and a single black glove on the hand of the same side) but nothing appears to be broken.

His largest problem is the possibility of infection, the boy is positively covered in dirt; Erik cannot even tell what the boy's hair color is, so the chances of the wounds getting dirty are high. The boy is malnourished too, which would further limit his ability to fight any sort of illness.

It's cold outside, hardly the best conditions to perform a medical assessment. The child should not be exposed to the frigid temperatures and he needs to be cleaned.

Erik scoops the boy fully into his arms, stands up and turns around to go back to his lair.

And pauses.

What is he doing?

He helped the child, fine. But what on Earth prompted him to even think about bringing him back to his home?

Erik hesitates for a few moments before he lowers himself to his knees. He prepares to set the boy down when a piece of the blue fabric on the boys arm comes loose.

The uncovered skin is red and distorted. Erik stares.

Oh.

_Oh_.

He unwraps the arm a little further, revealing even more of the boy's disfigured arm. A bit of silver embroidery on the fabric catches his eye.

**Bazil Bizarre's Freakshow**

_Oh._

That changes everything.

Erik looks back at the corpse on the ground, the man's tacky cuff links read BB.

That changes everything.

Erik closes his eyes for a few seconds and then stands up.

The boy needs medical attention. His lair under the opera will be the best place to treat him.

And the Phantom and the boy disappear into the night.

* * *

**A/N: Erik and Allen both have somewhat similar pasts so I've always wanted to write some sort of meeting between the two. Somehow that idea became this. As far as the writing itself goes, I love writing in present tense but don't actually do it very often. So I apologize if it reads a little awkwardly, I'm very out of practice. **

**Anyways, reviews are always appreciated.**


	2. Chapter 2

It's easy to forget that what he's doing is completely insane as he all but sprints through the tunnels leading to his lair.

The boy's breathing is shallow and, as he worries, he forgets the other things he should be worrying about too.

_He's just like me. _

It's terrifying, alarming; Erik has never felt such an instant kinship to anything. He'd seen other children abused, he'd been upset, maybe even stepped in a few times, but never once has he felt so...connected, for lack of a better word.

But he doesn't have to worry, doesn't have time to worry in fact. His most pressing problem is the child's condition. The rest of his, well, whatever it is, can be dealt with later.

A quick boat ride to his base of operations passes by in a blur (somehow he manages to hold the boy with one arm and paddle with the other and he doesn't think about why he doesn't just set him down) and he wastes no time in stepping off the boat and walking to his washroom.

It's an ornate little thing filled with all the amenities a Parisian bathroom can possibly have, including a full sized tub with running water, which Erik turns on as soon as he enters.

He doesn't want to fully submerge the child, he's not sure what kind of shock that would have on the emaciated youth's system, but he does want to use hot water to clean him off.

He carries the boy in one arm as he bustles about the room, grabbing towels and wash clothes and soap and medical supplies and anything else he thinks he'll need.

Keep busy, that's his plan. Think later, react now.

Erik sets the boy down for the first time since he's picked him up, leaning him against the standing tub as he does so. The tub fills quickly and the Phantom picks up a bucket he's brought over and dips it into the water, filling it nearly to the brim. He puts it down by the youth and kneels down on the floor in front of him.

He saturates a washcloth in water and, first and foremost, goes about cleaning any mess out of the child's wounds.

Dirty pools of water begin forming around the two of them, as mud and other debris fall off the thin frame in clumps. The phantom pays little mind as his immaculate bathroom floor and clothes are quickly ruined, focusing instead on the boy himself.

Erik realizes, the more he cleans, that the child is even paler than he had previously realized. His skin is almost colorless and the blue of his veins stands out in strong contrast. Even more cleaning reveals a red line on the boy's face.

Erik's brow furrows and he runs his cloth up the side of the wan face, following the red as he does so.

He lets out a single, angry exclamation as the entirety of the scar, an inverted star dripping a red line down to the bottom of the boy's face, crossed by another line directly under the eye, is revealed. He drops the washcloth and lets a single finger ghost over the intricate line.

Horrible.

The cut couldn't have been anything but intentional. Someone had _carved _it into his skin. Erik stares for a few moments longer and shakes his head.

Well, horrible or not, he isn't surprised. Humans are despicable. He's never had a hard time believing that before.

This newest piece of evidence is just another to add to the pile.

Turning attention away from the scar, he notices something else interesting. The boy's newly cleaned eyebrow is white.

And not the sort that comes with age or stress, a sort of pale gray or silver. No, it's stark white. Bright white. Whiter even than the fabric of Erik's gloves, although that's partially due to the amount of mud on them. In hindsight he realizes that he should have taken them off.

He runs one of his gloved fingers over the other eyebrow and enough dirt rubs off of it for him to realize that it's also white.

His first assumption is that it's dye, but a quick rinse down of the boy's hair has him realizing that the color travels all the way down to the roots.

Interesting. He's beginning to think that perhaps it was more than just a disfigured arm that had lead to the child being involved with a freak show.

Speaking of the arm, well Erik doesn't want to have to dwell on it for any longer than is necessary and it's rapidly cleaned and covered with a towel.

He dries the boy off after finishing his cleaning and he wrap bandages around the youth's chest and back quickly and efficiently.

The wounds are mostly superficial. Painful, but not life threatening. The real threats are possible infection and the boy's obvious malnourishment. But, Erik has solutions to and time enough to fix those two problems.

He scoops the boy up and walks him to the living area. He gently sets his patient on one of the couches and wraps two dry towels around him to help him maintain some of his quickly fleeing body heat. (A brief thought crosses his mind - that he should probably go about acquiring some more blankets if he plans to have the child stay with him - but the idea that anyone would stay with him is ridiculous enough to make the idea disappear before it even truly forms).

He walks into his own bedroom, paying little attention to the coffin that serves as his bed, an addition he'd made to his lair during a particularly somber period of his existence. It's been there for years and, while potentially alarming to others, he's never had others to deal with and, to him, it's little different than the dresser he's digging through, where it becomes increasingly obviously nothing he has will fit the boy well. But he assumes the short-sleeved, black sleepshirt he pulls from neatly organized drawers is better than nothing.

He walks back into the living area and tugs it over the boy's head.

The tailored fabric nearly drowns his tiny guest, the collar of the shirt all but falls off the his clavicular bones and ends far below the knees, but the bandages covering the child's chest, shoulders and arm with the addition of the black shirt are enough to provide him with something resembling modesty.

Erik picks up the boy's left arm, covered by bandages even though there's nothing physically wrong with it and slips the little black glove (the only part of the boy's dilapidated wardrobe he had bothered saving) over his hand.

He knows what it's like to want to hide.

And Erik isn't going to deprive anyone of their ability to do so.

He finishes and sits down on a nearby chair and realizes that his job is pretty much done. The small, sickly, pale, white-haired, horribly beaten, horribly scarred and gruesomely disfigured child's breathing has evened out into something less like unconsciousness and more like sleep.

React now, think _later_.

Well, it's **later**, and Erik doesn't know what to think.

* * *

**A/N: Writing from such a limited point of view after writing omniscient for so long is a lot more difficult that I expected it to be. It's kind of fun though, you really have to get inside of a character's head instead of using the rest of their environment to convey what's going on. It's definitely different.**

**Hope you enjoyed! Please Review!**


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